


No Hero

by fajrdrako



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2013-06-03
Packaged: 2017-12-13 21:33:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fajrdrako/pseuds/fajrdrako
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What makes someone a hero? What makes someone a villain?</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Hero

Identity was an elusive thing. Bottle in hand, Aral Vorkosigan sat on the parapet of the roof of the North Wing Tower at Vorkosigan Surleau and looked across the lawns and the lake and the trees to the mountains. In a world full of people, why was he Aral Vorkosigan, and not someone else? Luck? Genetics? Fate? A pointless accident from a random moment of love. Centuries of Vorkosigans, all distilled into one last heir. The hope of the future. The apple of his mother's eye. The despair of his father's.

Aral took another drink.

The sun, low in the sky, glittered on his boots. He had shined them himself. The sum of his accomplishments for the day. He meant to have polished his buttons, but he couldn't find the brass-wipe, and it smelled foul anyway. His father liked military precision. He thought it reflected a sense of discipline, something he had always wanted Aral to show, along with a sense of responsibility.

Not bloody likely.

Father, see, was a hero. The way some people talked, he'd driven the Cetagandans out of the sky practically single-handed, and Aral himself had seen what he'd accomplished once he'd decided to - been forced to - join the rebellion against poor old Mad Yuri. General Piotr Vorkosigan had gone without sleep, gone without food, gone without any pleasure in life, with the one single-minded goal of saving Barrayar from his wife's raving cousin. Yes, there was Vorish identity for you, all wrapped up in Yuri: a few centuries of purity in the bloodlines, maybe an invisible dollop of mutantism, a little inbreeding, a bad attitude, infinite power and infinite wealth - voila, a villainous despot.

Megalomaniac. Murderer. But he too had eaten and talked and put on his trousers one leg at a time and laughed and walked and shat and had sex just like anyone else. (Well, maybe not just like, but the principle would be similar.) Maybe he sat admiring the polish on his boots while watching the evening sun sink behind the incomparable mountains.

Yuri's father had not been so much a hero as an Emperor-Statesman. Was that easier, or harder, to face over the dinner table? Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.

There was only room for one hero in the Vorkosigan family. Aral had fought in the civil war with his father, but he'd just been a kid, scared half to death, haunted by memories of his mother's murder. And then at the end he'd killed the demon who'd killed his mother, and he couldn't even hate the bastard any more. All that bloodshed, all that suffering, and for what? All to get rid of a little man who should never have been allowed near a throne in the first place.

They had asked him then, point blank: "Do you want to be Emperor?" Aral had as good a claim as any. Well, better than most. The best. It wasn't just Vorkosigan blood in his alcohol-laced veins, no, it was Vorbarra blood too, and lots of it - the lineage of Emperors. Meaning the cut-throat bastards who were his ancestors had simply managed to be tougher than anyone else.

Ezar Vorbarra was the spokesman. Ezar had said to him on the fall of Emperor Yuri, "The throne is yours, if you wish it." And Aral had shouted "No!" and had run from the room, away from the men who would offer him this terrible, soul-destroying, mind-breaking responsibility. This temptation. This hope.

His father could have done it. He could have taken the power and not have been corrupted. His father was a hero and a leader of men. But his father was not half Vorbarra, not tainted with the genes of bloody bandits and half-mad demagogues from the time of the first settlements. 

Maybe Aral should have gone for it. Aral knew he would have been better than some of the scoundrels who had held the throne. Worse than some. Anyone would be better than Yuri. Aral himself, his pastry cook, his stable-boys. His dog. His dog's fleas.

Maybe Aral could have saved Barrayar during the years of chaos and struggle that followed, and should have tried. Maybe he should have taken the helm to make this world a better place. Who knew that re-establishing order in a war-torn planet could be worse than fighting the civil war? If this was victory, what would defeat have been like? He could have spared Ezar the headaches and the grey hairs and the haunted look in his eyes that had been replaced, month by month, with an increasingly callous shrewdness. 

Maybe Aral should have, but he couldn't. He wasn't a hero. He wasn't into that kind of self-sacrifice, or suicide. He had seen the role transform Ezar from a clever politician into a cruel and scheming husk, warmth and humanity drained from him, his whole being dedicated to only one thing: ruling Barrayar. The job had taken his soul in what, six months?

Aral didn't have the kind of courage it took to face that. He had never had that kind of courage. He had run - fourteen years old, terrified, in tears. He had found a place to hide, and stayed there until they stopped looking for him.

Ezar took the throne, and no one ever reproached Aral for his weakness. Over the intervening eleven years, people who wanted Ezar dead would approach Aral with suggestions of deposing the Emperor - because, they always said, by rights Aral should be on the throne, and Aral had the better legal claim. Aral never agreed or disagreed. He would smile, listen, get what information he could, and then promptly report them (in private) to Ezar.

Ezar Vorbarra had become a bitter, dangerous old man, shaped by the Imperial role. He had dedicated his life and everything in it to Barrayar, and Barrayar repaid him with plots and sullen resentment. 

Aral was no kind of hero, but he knew a hero when he saw one.

\- - -


End file.
